Get a Good Night Sleep!
One of the aims of personal development is to achieve elite performance; to be the very best that you can be and to do that, a good night sleep is essential. Sleep deprivation has many effects including lowered immunity, loss of control over emotions, inability to think straight and decreasing stress tolerance. It is hard to imagine an elite performance with all of that going on. In fact, the inability to sleep well would be enough, on its own, to create the desire to start a personal development program! Sleep is just critical and if you are not sleeping well, how do you get a good night sleep?
I suggest that you start your journey back to sleep by purchasing a small, simple but wonderful book called “Tired of Not Sleeping” by Dr Sandra Cabot. It is a short but excellent read and was the beginning of my own getting back to a good night sleep. The second thing to do is to visit your doctor and ensure that you have a simple problem that will respond to simple measures. Serious stress reactions and depression need to be ruled out and or treated before you begin to manage your own sleep disturbances yourself and sleep better forever.
My success factors for a good night sleep included:-
- Exercise in the morning and not the evening.
- Manage the stress.
- Go to sleep and awake at the same time every day and do not nap during the day.
- No caffeine after 2pm – in fact I gave it up altogether.
- A small amount of carbohydrate shortly before bedtime.
- When I started, I used a natural sleep medication and got 6 hours straight sleep from that.
- Have a massage occasionally, as late in the day as possible.
- When I woke during the night, I got up, went to another room and listened to relaxation cd’s until I fell asleep.
- Start yoga and or meditation and persist until you see results.
- Reduce television watching in the evening and go to bed when you feel tired. Do not wait as you might miss the sleep cycle and have to wait for the next one – maybe up to an hour.
- Do everything possible to keep on having fun. I love the bush and spent as much time there as possible which helped greatly.
Finally, do not keep reinforcing to yourself that you have a sleep problem by constantly thinking or talking about how hard it is to sleep. Do everything that you can to apply the Law of Attraction and think about the good sleep that you do get, think about how lovely it will be when you sleep a full night, imagine yourself in a year sleeping soundly every night and celebrate every little achievement on the path back to a good night sleep. Most importantly, take charge of your own issue and create the solutions.
